DCHindley

I am curious.

Is anyone aware of an Eng. Translation of Verisimilia. Laceram conditionem Novi Testamenti exemplis illustrarunt et ab origine repetierunt by Allard Pierson, Samuel Adrianus Naber & Arthur Tappan Pierson, 1886 (295 pp)?

FWIW, I have found a scan of the book in the original ecclesiastical Latin, and several web authors praise it as brilliant, but as far as I know no one has translated it into English!

Someone tell me I am wrong, and point out where such a translation can be found.

Thanky danky.

DCH

Per Schweitzer, Paul & His Interpreters,

In the year 1886 [Allard Pierson] published, in association with the philological scholar, Samuel Adrian Naber, the Verisimilia. The book was not adapted to make a deep impression. It was too much the ingenious essay for that.

The two friends combined their efforts in order to show New Testament exegetes how much they had left unexplained in the Epistles to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, and how many problems, incoherencies, and contradictions appear when one reads these writings with an open mind. (123n3)

But instead of making a thorough examination of the problems and laboriously arguing the case with the other students of Paulinism, the authors at once proceed to suggest what appears to them a possible solution. They claim to have discovered that the inconsistencies are due in the main to the presence of two strata of thought which have been worked together. The one is of a sharply anti-Jewish character; the other consists of milder and more conciliatory ideas.

If it be assumed, so runs their argument, that Christianity was in its real origin a Jewish sect which had liberal ideas in regard to the law and directed its expectation towards the Messiah, the antinomian sections of the Epistles represent documents of that period.

The present form of the letters is due to the fact that a later " Churchman " —the authors call him Paulus episcopus, and think that he may have served as model for the Paul of Acts—worked into them the second, milder set of ideas. [pages 123-124]

123n3 ... The work gives a running analysis of the letters in the course of which very interesting questions are thrown out. Why is nothing said about the earthly life of Jesus? Why is no trace of the influence of this Paul's thought to be found in history? Do the various characteristics and actions of his which are recorded show us a character which is at all intelligible?

The authors assume that the Jewish movement which led up to " Christianity " at first had only to do with the Messianic belief in general. Only later, through the blending of Greek myths with Isaiah liii., did the belief arise that the expected Messiah had already come and had passed through death and resurrection.

The analysis of the Pauline Epistles is followed by essays upon the Paul of Acts and some chapters on the Fourth Gospel. The close is formed by an essay on the gradual origin of the conception of Christ in the New Testament.